Published in Poetry Magazine (June 2022 Issue)
You can tell from my uneven hand
from the hunched back of my “Shin”
from the crooked lines of my “Noon”
I’m under the lash of forgetting my native script.
I walk
toward the sea, toward the words
sinking low
then lower.
Break this hand that refuses to admit
it’s a thousand times harder to wander from tongue to tongue
than land to land.
Translated from Persian by Armen Davoudian.